Snow Princess
by LookCloser2
Summary: Lucas raises his daughter by himself, believing her mother to be dead. His daughter later tells the story of her parents and reflects on the idea that not every story has a fairy-tale ending.


I wrote this story as a challenge for myself but I posted it for feedback on my writing. Reviews are always appreciated. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I do not own One Tree Hill or its characters.

SNOW PRINCESS

This is the story of my parents. This is not a love story, not really. Or maybe it is, but more than that it's a story of loss. I only learned it years later, after it was too late to fix all the mistakes and hurt and longing. And regret. Regret is a funny thing. It can make people so bitter that they push away the people around them and relish nothing but their painful memories. But if you can learn to let go, to accept that the past can't be changed and learn to live with your mistakes, then you can move on. Then you can be happy. It took a long time before my parents finally learned this. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.

She stood outside as the snow fell softly around her. When she came home from work it had been flurries visible in the orange streetlights and the car headlights, but now it was fat, white flakes she could catch with her tongue. She remembered…

The first time it had been at a party. She had arrived from California five weeks ago and was nervous about the impending snowstorm. The weather forecasters were calling it the worst storm of the decade, a "blizzard to be remembered." When she had confided this to him he had laughed and pulled her outside to the balcony overlooking Central Park. She hadn't known him for long, but he had helped her the first day at the office and they had gotten to be friendly. Now she was his editor. Out on the balcony they had stood and watched the first snowfall she had ever seen. Their hair and shoulders were covered in huge, white snowflakes and when she shivered he pulled her in close. They stood there quietly, slightly drunk, listening to the clink of glasses and laughter inside and the quietness of the city streets outside as the city was slowly blanketed by snow. He had kissed her and that made two firsts that night – her first snow and their first kiss – and those two firsts were soon followed by a third.

The second time had been after their first big fight. She had stormed out of his apartment into the city streets below to find that the predicted snow had started coming down heavily. She remembered seeing her first snow with him at that work party and had realized that she couldn't lose him. She rushed back inside and fell into his arms as he stuttered out an apology. Then they had kissed and that had been the second time.

But it was summer now and there was no more snow. There was no more him. "Flight 4357 to San Francisco now boarding. Last call." announced the flight attendant. With one last glance out the window at the bare, snowless ground she stepped up to the gate and handed over her boarding pass. She walked through the gate without a second glance. She was going home, to a place where it never snowed, and that was a good thing.

He heard a plane go by overhead as he stepped out of the office toward home. He didn't look up. It could be her plane; he had no way of knowing. But it didn't matter anymore. She was leaving – she was gone. His flight for Tree Hill left in a few days. New York held too many memories. Lindsay had been right. It was time to go home.

He held his book in his hands, amazed that it was so solid, so real. At 24, how could he have a book published? Seeing his book now brought back thoughts he didn't want to recall.

_Lindsay had been his editor; they had worked so hard to make that manuscript just right. Now he held all the frustration, all the long days, sleepless nights and endless cups of coffee in his hands. He and Lindsay had done it together. She had eaten with him at eleven at night, when they finally took a break. She had sat with him at the bar as he tried to drown his writer's block in the bottom of the glass. Or maybe he had been searching for answers. He hadn't found them. __She had run out to Starbucks whenever their caffeine supply ran low and __had __shared a taxi home from work at two in the morning. __He remembered the first night they hadn't come home at all. They'd been working late, going over the pages again and again. All it took was a quick coffee break and both were sound asleep. Lucas awoke the next morning, stretched out on the leather sofa in Lindsay's office. His arms were around her, her head snuggled against his chest, and his fingers were tangled in her hair. __He breathed out slowly, tried to stay still, didn't want to wake her.__She shifted; her eyes opened. They were a beautiful __green that reminded him of someone else he had known a long time ago. "Hey," she whispered, still reveling in the cozy morning stillness._

_Suddenly, the door opened. "Lindsay, I need – oh." The man's voice cut off as he realized, or wondered, what he had just walked in on. "Oh, I'll just, well, um, here," he blustered, as he quickly placed a manila folder on her desk and left, pulling the door firmly shut behind him. Lindsay blushed, burrowing her face in Lucas' shoulder and silently laughing. He felt her shoulders shake as he realized just how amusing the situation was, and how awkward it would shortly be. Lucas left the office first, nonchalantly, but knew from the quick looks and guarded smiles that word ha__d__ spread quickly. No one craved and spread scandal more than people who sat in cubicles all day, except,__ perhaps, high schoolers. _

_That weekend was the blizzard and the office party, and nothing was the same after that._

He snapped back to the present as he heard the knock on his bedroom door. "Come in," Lucas called, wondering who it might be. He only locked the door to outside at night and his friends usually walked right in – although that had gotten him in trouble not just a few times.

The door opened with a gust of wind and snowflakes blew into the room. A large, young man stepped into the room. "Hello, my name is Gabriel Sanders. You, I take it, are Lucas Scott?" Lucas nodded, suddenly on edge. Sanders wasn't that common a name, and he'd only known one person with that name in his life. Lindsay. "I'm afraid I have some bad news. My younger sister, Lindsay, was in a car accident two weeks ago. She didn't make it. But she had something of yours, and we decided it was only right that you have her." He patted his large belly gently.

"Her?" asked Lucas, not understanding. He heard a whimper as the young man unzipped his jacket and pulled a bundle of blankets out. Lucas realized now that this man was not really very large at all. He smiled at his mistake before realizing that the man, Gabriel Sanders, was holding the whimpering package out to him. Gabriel pulled back a corner of a blanket as he cradled the little bundle. It was a baby.

"Lucas Scott, meet your daughter."

Lucas reached out and carefully took the baby into his arms. She stared up at him with giant, blue eyes and he couldn't help but smile. A daughter – he had a daughter. "What's her name?"

"Adèline Lenore Scott. Little Adèle. She's a month old."

Lucas looked down at his child and tears came to his eyes. "Thank you," he whispered.

Gabriel Sanders nodded and handed him a slip of paper with an address and cell number. "In case you need anything."

Lucas whispered, "Okay," and then the door was shut and Gabriel was gone. Lucas was left alone with his motherless newborn in his arms.

"Did you do it?" Gabriel was accosted with the question the second he came back from the airport.

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"Thank you."

"He said, 'Thank you?'"

"Yes."

"What did you tell him about me?"

"That you were dead."

"He'll take good care of her. It's better this way. It's because I love her."

"I know."

"I just couldn't do it." She didn't know if she meant raising a baby alone or having an abortion.

"I know. It'll be okay, Lindsay. We'll all be okay, now."

When Adèle was older Lucas told her that she came to him in the middle of a blizzard. He called her his Snow Princess and tickled her until she admitted that she loved him the mostest. Her hair and eyes were the same dirty gold and deep blue as his, but when she laughed she sounded just like her mother.

She had asked him about her once. He had walked over to his drawer and pulled out a crinkled photograph. It was a picture of Lindsay and Lucas in New York, in the snow. She was walking on the stone wall of a bridge and he was holding her hand to help her balance. They were both laughing. "This is your mother," he told her. "She loved you very much."

Adèle leaned over and kissed the picture. "Hello, Mama," she said.

They didn't mention her for many years after that, but one day as he cleaned Adèle's room he saw that same photograph tucked beneath her pillow, and he knew that she missed the mother she never knew.

Lindsay looked down at the gold band on her finger and smiled. For the first time in a long time she was happy. She only regretted one thing in her life. It was a mistake she could never take back.

Adèle was seven when Lucas married his childhood sweetheart. He didn't love Brooke, at least not more than anyone. But Adèle needed a mother, and he would do anything for her.

Once upon a time, he had looked into a lover's eyes and saw the same emerald green color as Brooke's. Now, he looked into her eyes again, his wife's eyes, and all he could think about was the one person he wanted desperately to forget.

My father used to read me fairytales every night as he tucked me into bed. If this were a fairytale, my mother and father would have found each other and fallen back in love. But by the time they finally saw each other again, it had been too long.

My father had accepted that there would always be an ache in his heart for the love he let go. When I was nineteen, he moved with my stepmother and my two half-siblings to a ski cabin in the Poconos. My little brother and sister moved out when they left for college and my stepmother died a few years ago from cancer. But my father still lives there. He writes novels and people know his name, but never him. I see him twice a year when I visit. He hasn't left the mountains in twelve years.

My mother never gave up on seeing me again, but she was too scared to look. She thought that I would hate her for abandoning me and that I wouldn't understand why she had to give me up. I still don't think I understand all that she went through before and after she gave me to my father, or why she never came and found us. I met her when I was twenty-seven, three years older than she and my father were when they had me. She cried and hugged me and introduced me to my stepfather and their four boys. I was her only daughter until the day she died. I like to think that she is watching over me now, guiding me.

My parents never married each other and they never divorced their spouses. I could never understand it when they so obviously loved each other. But I think that the regret over the years had taken its toll and neither could admit that they had made a mistake in giving up on their love all those years ago.

I'd like to think that I know better than they did. I have a wonderful husband lying here beside me and three beautiful children. We live in a white house on a lake and there is a rope swing on the maple tree in the front yard. But I am my parents' child. There was a boy, once, whom I loved very much, and whom I let go. Sometimes, when I come across an old photo album or hear a song on the radio, it brings me back through the years to when I was seventeen. I think that it is our burden that we must make our own mistakes, create our own _what ifs_, and our parents' burden that they can't stop us from following in their footsteps.

My father was there when I learned to say Dada, when I learned to walk and for my first day of kindergarten. He taught me how to use a spoon, how to ride a bike and how to sound out the words in my picture books. He helped me to understand that life is about finding happiness and love and cherishing it, protecting it, never letting it go. That was how he raised me, with a fierce love and the knowledge that he would always be there for me.

It was my mother who taught me to never give up hope. It took a quarter of a century before she saw me again after giving me up, but she knew that that day would eventually come. She was right.

My parents were never as happy as those few months when they were together. Sometimes I wish that I had known them then, before the years painted wrinkles across their cheeks and they were worn out from the stress of living. But for my father, and later on for my mother, I was a reminder of those happy times, the only remnant. When I was little, I used to catch my father watching me with tears in his eyes. He never let himself cry in front of me. I'm not sure he even knew how.

So, as I said, this isn't a story about finding love. In some ways, it's about losing it. It's about making a choice when you are young and living with it for the rest of your life. But maybe it's also about being content with what you do have and doing the best you can, because you have to. Maybe just as much as it's about loss, it's about hope. From my parents, I've learned to let go of the past – I know how it can haunt those who don't.

He lay in bed that night holding his and Lindsay's daughter on his chest. He had placed her gently in his old crib that he'd found in the attic, but he couldn't stand how small and helpless she looked in there and had snatched her up again. Now she was cuddled up to his chest, leaving a wet spot of drool on his white t-shirt and breathing very softly. Her thumb was curled near her mouth, but only twice had she actually found it to put in her mouth.

Lucas cradled his daughter in his arms and wondered how he would ever do what he had to do. He stroked her soft wisps of yellow hair as he rocked her. Suddenly, with a soft cry, the baby opened her eyes and Lucas saw a watery blue color as she attempted to focus on his face. She had his eyes; that was certain. He stuck out his pinky finger and she grabbed it with her little fist, clinging to him as though she knew he was the only one who could help her now.

"It's okay," he whispered. "Daddy's here. Daddy's here, now."

For me, the snow has always been special. It was during a snowstorm that my parents first fell in love and the day my father first saw me it was snowing hard. I live up in Canada now, and when the weatherman forecasts big blizzards most people stock up on food and flashlights and huddle by their fires inside. But I pull out all my warmest clothes and bundle up and walk through the woods. The wind whistles through the trees and I stick out my tongue to catch the snowflakes.

_"How much do you love me?" I was squirming and laughing as my father tickled me. _

_"So much!"_

_"How much?"__ That wasn't enough. He tickled me until I could barely gasp out the words._

_"I love you __the __mostest__, Daddy!"He grinned and stopped tickling me, drawing me into a tight hug._

_"I love you, too, my little Snow Princess."_


End file.
